"However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody - any movement - that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings"

(see more of Hitchen's interview by Johann Hari)I'd seen him this weekend on Tim Russert's show on CNBC talking with Andrew Sullivan. Some interesting views there...and had made more sense than 90% of what you see passing for punditry on television these days. Hitchens epitomizes the great leap of logic that many of us had to make in the wake of 9/11: we had to start facing reality as it was, not as we wished it was. That the seriousness and immediacy of the threat of Islamofascism is something we cannot wish away. Incidentally, one can read part of Hitchen's weltanschauung pre-9/11 in Martin Amis's affectionate Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million which deals with Stalinism and its impact in the Western intelligentsia.